Brenda Heaton

Brenda Heaton holds joint appointments in the Schools of Dental Medicine and Public Health. She began her career with the Dental School nearly 20 years ago during which time she also received her MPH and PhD degrees in epidemiology from the School of Public Health. She currently contributes to the training of masters and doctoral level students in both Epidemiology and Dental Public Health. Her research interests are primarily centered on population disparities in oral health, particularly among young children. Her NIH-funded work applies complex systems science methods, both social network analysis and agent-based modeling, to understand the underlying mechanisms responsible for generating the population distributions of oral health. She has active data collection initiatives within the public housing communities of Boston to understand the role of social networks in behavioral risk factors for chronic disease. Separately, she has funding to develop agent-based models of Early Childhood Caries within which she conduct experimentation to identify promising targets of intervention. Additionally, she is funded to engage in intervention development with the primary goal of intervening on behavior at the level of the social network.